Ancient Angola Crocodile Ate Fish as Oil Fields Formed

Aug. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Scientists have found a new type of
crocodile that trundled across Angola millions of years ago
while the crude oil that it now pumps as Africa’s second-largest
producer was forming.

PaleoAngola, a team of fossil-hunters from the U.S.,
Portugal, Angola and the Netherlands, found the reptile’s 30
million-year-old remains this year on a beach within sight of
oil rigs drilling into the same rocks offshore Cabinda province
north of the Congo River.

“The croc is certainly new to the age in which it was
found,” Louis Jacobs, geology and paleontology professor at
Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said in an e-mailed
response to queries yesterday. “It would have been the size of
a large modern croc, but two-thirds of the head would have been
a narrow snout adapted for fish eating.”

Some of the 1.78 million barrels Angola pumped daily in
July was formed around the same time as the crocodile fossil,
after Africa and South America broke apart through plate
tectonics. Oil explorers such as ConocoPhillips and BP Plc are
betting on the industry’s Atlantic mirror theory which says
there may be huge deposits of oil deep beneath the sea off West
Africa, similar to those across the ocean in Brazil.

Resembles Gharial

The crocodile, which is yet to be named, may be related to
a fossil found in the province almost 100 years ago and a more
recent find in Kenya, Jacobs said. The beast was probably
coastal and isn’t directly related to modern African crocodiles,
he said. It resembled a gharial, but wasn’t one, he said.
Gharials are a type of crocodile found in Asia.

The team also found a well-preserved skull of a 70 million-year-old mosasaur, sometimes called a marine monster, north of
Luanda, the capital, and another in southern Namibe province
with three smaller ones in its stomach.

“Quite a last meal,” Jacobs said.

Other finds this year include a tooth from an
arsinoitherium, a rhino-like animal with two large horns forming
a V off its nose that is known from digs in Egypt, and skulls of
18 million-year-old relatives of the pygmy right whale, which
swims off Angola’s southern coast today, Jacobs said. They’re
the continent’s only fossils of the oldest filter-feeding whales
known from Africa, he said. One skull has two fish fossils in
its blow hole.

Jacobs will report the finds to the Geological Society of
America in October. Rock records in Angola, which is about twice
the size of Texas, show how the continents formed, he said.
Namibia to the south lacks such evidence while countries to the
north are covered in vegetation.

Puzzle Pieces

“The icon of modern earth sciences is the puzzle-like fit
of Africa and South America,” Jacobs said. “Angola is the
story of Africa as a continent told through its rocks and no
place else can say that.”

PaleoAngola is the first “boots-on-the-ground” scientific
team to probe Angola since the acceptance of the plate tectonics
concept in the early 1960s, Jacobs said. The entire coastline is
fossil-bearing, he said.

Funding has come from Exxon Mobil Corp. and La Vida
Foundation of Angola after support from the National Geographic
Society and the American Chemical Society ran out, he said. AP
Moeller-Maersk, Safmarine Inc. and Daam Holdings Co. help with
shipping and new aid is welcome, he said.

The team has raised more than half of $750,000 needed for a
National Geographic Society documentary and has spent $100,000 a
year on site visits since digging up pieces of Angolatitan in
2005. The 13-meter (43-foot) plant eater, the OPEC member’s
first dinosaur discovery, weighed the equivalent of about seven
Toyota Corollas and roamed deserts 90 million years ago.

“The marine reptiles of Bentiaba, Namibe, have told more
in a few years than 200 years of research in Europe have,”
Jacobs said. “For their age, the fossils are the best in the
world in terms of how many there are and how many different
species occur together.”